


Epitaph

by ninja_cleric



Category: Final Fantasy VI
Genre: Airships, Angst and Feels, Crash Landing, During Canon, F/M, Falling In Love, Flashbacks, Friendship/Love, I'm Bad At Tagging, Novelization, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:47:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28343382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninja_cleric/pseuds/ninja_cleric
Summary: A bit of a novelization of the visit to Daryl’s Tomb and my own take on Setzer and Daryl’s relationship.
Relationships: Daryl/Setzer Gabbiani
Kudos: 4





	Epitaph

_World of Ruin_

“Be careful,” he said to them. “There could be anything down there.”

And truly, he didn’t know what they would find. Even before the world broke apart he had not been here in years. There had been part of him that hoped the entire shrine was nothing but dust, or under a hundred feet of water, or better yet, both. Then he could shrug and return to the small table by the window and the strong bitter brew that made the fact that every day was practically identical to the last a blessing and not a curse. But there it stood as they trudged through the crispy dead grass up the knoll south of the town. Its red brick arch and filigreed iron door unscathed, as stubborn and unyielding as the woman he built it for. He heaved up the latch, grabbed the wrought handle and pulled. The hinges protested with a groan but ultimately the door swung open. The cool damp smell of the earth tinged with something else rushed up to them. “You be careful, too,” he thought to himself. He didn’t know what he would dislodge inside himself coming here.

**

_World of Balance_

Today was supposed to be the day. Rumours were that the airship had been spotted over Figaro castle. If the pilot made it to Jidoor by sunset it would have been the fastest crossing of the continents on record. The good citizens of Jidoor could not keep their eyes from the Eastern skies. Every time a bird flew by children cried out, “There is the Falcon!”

The well heeled were wagering left and right on this daredevil racing across the known world. Setzer sat in the small but comfortable office in the Opera House and took bets both for and against.

He himself had bet a substantial sum against this preposterous idea. Some grease monkey trying to get famous doing something stupid. Flying an airship at speed is a risky proposition – they are temperamental crafts at the best of times and flying too fast is a dangerous game. This greenhorn that no one had heard of before, some fool with only one name, Daryl, would be lucky if he didn’t turn his ship to kindling and scrap metal with the added bonus of a large ball of flame to notify the world of his failure. The last Setzer had heard the ship was getting a propeller repair in Narshe. Still, it was hard to deny the spectacle. And if there was something Setzer could appreciate, it was a flare for the dramatic. 

But the sun was only starting to head towards the West when the true Falcon appeared on the horizon. The huge floating craft grew larger and larger and the hum of it's propellers, good or bad, filled the air. With a cloud of dust, ship landed in the field just outside of town and a crowd rushed out to greet it. Their excitement grew as the engines slowed and stopped and the gangway opened. The haze settled and a small figure dressed in a long red coat appeared in the doorway. An aviator cap and goggles still shielded most of the pilot’s face. After a brief moment with arms upheld in victory, the fastest airship pilot in recorded history swaggered down the gangplank to the crowd’s cheers.

Setzer wasn’t a sore loser. After briefly tallying his losses, his thoughts turned to a floating casino. The airship was amazing and that surely would be quite the draw for the rich and those hoping to be. And no need to go racing around at high speeds! He strode forward eager to congratulate the winner and to inquire about his newest business venture.

Setzer edged forward in the throng – tall and thin he managed to slip through without much difficulty and soon was standing at the center of the action. ~~~~

“Setzer Gabbiani,” he said and stuck out his hand. “I’m eager to shake the hand of the man who beat the odds and cost me so much money.”

The pilot turned away from the reporter to face the dapper man with the long silver hair and took off the heavy leather cap and glasses. “Ah yes, the notorious Mr. Gabbiani – famous speculator and … opera aficionado? News of your doubts traveled almost as fast as I did. I’m glad to have relieved you of them.”

The gambler found himself momentarily at a loss for words.

“You … you’re a woman.”

“Well, yes, these things do happen,” she smiled and ran her fingers through her messy gold hair before taking his still outstretched hand and kissing it. “Sorry to hear I lost you a small fortune, but that will teach you to bet against me.”

“I look forward to the many other lessons you will teach me,” he said.

“Just remember, whenever you think you’re right, you’re wrong. And that’s a big mistake.”

“Then, ma’am, may the Goddesses never let me think so again.”

**

She showed him how to start. She said airships were a lost art and she was happy to take someone under her wing – literal and figurative – who was interested. Especially someone with a steady income.

“I like a project,” she told him. ~~~~

She took him around to the machinists and the rope walks, showed him how to bargain for the highest quality canvas, told him about the dusty cluttered shops where he could buy altimeters and sextants. And she stood next to him as he opened the wooden chests and unpacked the pieces.

They had a small crew helping them, but Daryl showed Setzer how to handle the fine mechanical bits. Installing the gyroscopes, making sure all the linkages were connected just so.

It was fun doing things with his hands besides for holding a glass of brandy or concealing a pair of trick dice or tallying up wins and losses for the Opera House in his elegant handwriting. There was certainly plenty of that as well. Daryl, true to her style, did not hold back that she thought he was a damn fool to do such things. “You’re no better than the people you want to con. Wasting your life doing stupid things for money. You should be tensioning your air rudders!”

But still it was also fun to hold a glass of brandy and a pair of trick dice.

**

He would never forget the first day it flew.

He had flown the Falcon any number of times. And it was amazing, like nothing else he had experienced. To rush along with the wind in his face and know it was just he and Daryl, the only humans in the skies, soaring above everyone else living their humdrum lives was better than he ever could have imagined.

But the first time he flew his own ship, it was something else entirely.

He felt a pang of hesitation while the steam engines started up and the envelope filled with ether lighter than air. He didn’t have to say anything, she sensed it.

“I helped you build it,” she said. “It won’t fail you.”

And buoyed by her words he shifted the brass levers that caused the machine to roar like an animal and raised the creation into the sky.

“Ok, now lets see what it can do,” she said.

He turned the dials and it started forward, slipping through the heavens in a way that did not seem like it should be physically possible.

And so, she asked. What are you going to call it?

“The Blackjack.” He told her.

“Not the Seagull?”

And so together they began their conquest of the world. Her for adventure and excitement, him for money and other material pleasures. They flew over deserts and mountains and across the churning oceans. King and Queen of the skies. 

**

They were almost home when the belting broke.

“Damnit,” she declared as she climbed up out of the engine chamber. “Completely destroyed. I should have milled the parts myself.”

“I need to go into the town a little ways back and see if there is a shop that carries these parts.”

“I need to go see if there’s a poker game to be had in the pub,” he said with a smile.

“Ok,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “I’ll come and get you before I install the new belt. You should see how to do this in case I’m not around sometime to save you.”

She flicked the collar of her coat up against the rain and trudged off.

He watched her go before strolling into the bar. Where there were indeed several locals who definitely wanted to play poker with a man who looked like he had money to lose. “Oh, um, I do play sometimes,” he would say. “You know, just for fun.” After the fourth hand, the men were discovered that it was they and not he that would be leaving with their purses lightened and the mood changed.

“Well, thank you, gentlemen,” he nodded on his way out of the bar.

I’ve perhaps not timed this as well as I should have, he thought as he prepared to make his exit, wondering if they would perhaps follow him back to the disabled ship. But he needn’t have worried about them wasting energy on a trip to the outskirts of town. The men were happy to express their displeasure at being hustled right in the alley behind the bar.

Setzer reached for the short dirk at his belt, but three against one were not favorable odds.

Quick blows to his stomach and then his head made sure he was not much of a threat at all.

One man reached in to take the bag of gil with brass knuckled hands. “Make sure he don’t forget us,” Setzer heard the man say to his companion. Then he saw the silver blade glint as it came towards his face. And the puddle he was sitting in became unmistakably redder.

He wasn’t sure how long he had lain there in the rain when he heard her voice.

“You damn fool.”

She shone her torch on his face. Her eyebrows raised as she inhaled sharply. She took off her scarf and used it to staunch the worst of the bleeding. Under the cover of darkness, somehow she got him back to the Falcon. She sat him down in her cabin and took off his coat and his bloody silk shirt. In a few minutes she was back with hot water and towels and a bottle of whiskey.

“Drink this,” she ordered.

“And here I didn’t think you approved of my indulgences.”

“Shush, this is going to hurt.”

He could see her treading a needle.

“Umm … Have you ever done this before?” he asked.

“Nope.”

“Well, then maybe you should take me to a doctor?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t do stupid things,” she snapped “like try and scam folks who have no money to start with and who will surely put the word out that there is a traveling gambler ripping people off. If there is a medic in this town or the next, they will no doubt be aware of your presence and less than pleased at your behavior. And you can’t sit around with giant open wounds while I fix the running belts. So me and a needle is your jackpot.”

Her small calloused hands that could carefully adjust the tension on the important bolts that controlled the delicate mechanisms for flight gently touched his face as she stitched the wounds closed.

“I did my best, but some of these will leave scars.”

“I almost had them, too!” He lamented. “It would have been enough for the mahogany floors in the main gaming room.”

“Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP! You could have been killed!” She shouted, not just generally irritated, her normal state, but genuinely upset. He looked over at her. His vision was blurry from the whiskey and from the blows to the head.

“Daryl? Are you okay?” He paused. “Are you … crying?”

“Yes I’m crying! If I’d come back and you were laying in the street bleeding from your miserable neck instead of just your damn pretty face…” she paused and blew her nose.

He didn’t know what to say. “You think I’m pretty?”

She leaned over and put her hand on his bare chest as she whispered to him. He reached up and touched her face. While she would not admit that it happened this way later, after that they were more than just rivals or friends.

**

There was nothing like flying.

While he felt satisfied cruising over the landscape gazing down at the world stretched out below him or installing a parquet floor in the gondola, she wanted more.

To go further, to go faster, to go higher. She was always tinkering and adjusting and then, leaving him in her wake.

“These experimental air thrusters are a little bit unstable but I’ll be able to reach an incredible altitude,” she told him, wiping the grease off her hands with a rag.

She was a genius and a better mechanic than he would ever be. And yet … it seemed like a perilous road she was going down, or up, as the case may be. He voiced what was often at the back of his thoughts. “Daryl, this is dangerous. What do you have to prove to people?” He asked her.

She was foolish and reckless. And yet, she had a purpose and a dream. He felt jealous of her single minded ambition.

“Has anyone ever told you you’re exceedingly cautious for a gambler?” she scoffed. “I want to do it because I can, because no one else has. But people should know I was the woman who flew closest to the stars!” She paused, then declared as if she had just thought of it, “If anything happens to me, the Falcon is yours!”

He tried to laugh it off. “Don’t worry, one day I’ll win it from you fair and square.”

“In a card game, right?” she laughed. “Because you definitely won’t win it in a race! But don’t worry, I know you like looking at my ass, that’s why you’re always behind me. “

**

Before she flew off, he had asked her to meet him on their hilltop before sunset. And that’s where he was sitting. It was like the day he met her. Looking into the distance, thinking every bird near the horizon was the Falcon. He waited while the sun went down and until there was not a single strip of light left to separate sky from land. Still he sat on the hill shivering in the night. Still she didn’t come.

Even then he knew what had happened.

Truly, it could have been anything – a breakdown, a stop to assist someone in need, some bullshit issue with imperial airspace – they had all happened before. But, he knew the truth.

He eventually stood up, cold and stiff, and made his way back to the Blackjack. He went to the shiny bar and poured himself a drink. And another one. But two was enough. He thought, it wouldn’t do if she showed up pissed off and covered in engine oil to find him drunk and pathetic. Yet as he lay on the velvet chaise lounge in his state room he knew she wasn’t coming back.

**

_World of Ruin_

He pushed open the final door.

The four of them stood in front of the white cenotaph that practically glowed in the dimness.

“DARYL SLEEPS HERE” was carved into the translucent marble.

That was a lie.

It took him a year to find the wreckage. When he did he carefully cataloged and preserved as much as he could. “Who’s wasting their life now, Daryl?” he had sighed to himself as he sorted through another load of boards and bolts and packed the gas dispenser in a crate even though he didn’t know if it still functioned.

But he never found a body. Not a scrap of her red leather coat not a single golden earring the same color as her hair. Burnt up in the crash? Carried off by wild beasts? Was she alive somewhere? An amnesiac living a new life entirely. Some traveling minstrel or a common shopkeep’s wife. He coughed out a laugh at the thought of that.

He had scoured the nearby towns for any memory of a woman appearing after the falling star of the crash. But no one could remember a strange woman, injured or not. If she had amnesia, she made sure it was catching.

But the Falcon slept here. And where the Falcon was, Daryl was sure to be nearby. He decided that it was true in life as well as in death.

He barely glanced at the stone and kept pressing forward, leading them down the endless staircases deeper into the tunnels.

When she died it was the end of something. He rebuilt the Falcon piece by piece and then built the shrine around it. And then he closed the door, got onto the Blackjack, and flew away. He never even thought to look for what he had with her. She wasn’t out there. He’d searched for a year. He didn’t need to look further.

He traveled the world, made money in the casino. He drank expensive alcohol. He chased after women, some of whom let themselves be caught. It wasn’t good, but it was good enough.

And that was more or less how he ended up with these yahoos with their two headed coins and their plans to save the world. Look how well that went for everyone. And when the world ended, it was like losing everything that mattered all over again.

He stopped on a narrow landing and put his hand on the stone wall. Suddenly he was exhausted. He was sure this idea was stupid and they were all going to be killed in some very painful fashion and he didn’t want to devote one more iota of energy – physical or mental to it.

He watched the trio of blondes (what was it with him and blondes?) go slowly down the steps. It would be better to go back to the room in the inn and that bartender with the red dress or the occasional traveler who thought they were good at poker but really weren’t – there was something that somehow had not declined after the world ended - and pretend none of this ever happened.

But then in the darkness it was like she was here, whispering to him.

“ _Whenever you think you’re right, you’re wrong – remember?”_

_The Falcon is yours. Use it to take a real risk. Not just for money or for a tick in the “win” column but to do what has never been done before._

And now … he could do that.

Something that never had been done before.

He caught up with them as they reached the bottom of the stairway. He shined the light from the electric torch into the enormous chamber. There sat the Falcon. It was a behemoth. Resting. Ready. Like a sleeping dragon.

He opened the gangway and they climbed aboard.

“This is it.” He said as they came out onto the deck. He couldn’t help it as a smile crinkled his face and pulled the scars tight. It felt strange to smile here on the deck again.

“This is THE Falcon?” asked the king.

Setzer nodded.

“And this was your friend’s ship?” said the General.

“Yes,” he said. “She was … she was something else.” There was not more to be said about her to them. Daryl was always one to let her ship do the talking. And so he left it at that.

The king looked around. “I finally think we might just pull this off.”

Setzer went down to the engine room and lit the fires. In spite of its years of dormancy, with a flick of the flint the ship roared to life as if it had been waiting impatiently for this moment. He felt her here in every piece of her creation. Drowned out by the din of the machines he whispered to her, “My life is a chip in your pile. Ante up.” 

He came back onto the deck. It was like the first time all over again. He took a deep breath and released the air ballasts. The great ship lifted off the ground once more. It hovered there, magically. He exhaled as he grabbed hold of the acceleration lever and slid it forward. The Falcon started down the long tunnel towards the light.


End file.
